WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

Random Head Processing Of The Day

Me: Nope. In many ways, it was. I defined GLOBAL FREQUENCY from the start as Rescue Fiction. if not explicitly Post-9/11 Rescue Fiction. Because Thunderbirds is the anti-Superman. Now, I just woke up, so it’s okay if that doesn’t make sense. But immediately after 9/11 I found people on message boards ACTUALLY SAYING OUT LOUD that they wished Superman were real because he would have saved the WTC. And that is an anti-evolutionary wish. What you say is, I wish the dozen or so people who knew this was going to happen could have informed someone who’d actually listen and that we had had the sense/madness to engineer a mechanical response to someone attacking NYC with flying death tubes

Thunderbirds: Darwin’s Airforce

Matt Jones: 2000 giant lighter-than-air pollution-eating biomimetic heavy-lifting portuguese men o’war that swarm slowly in groups proportionate to threat-level over soon-to-be disaster areas predicted by the planetary-skin, acting as an early warning visualisation in the sky (shite, it’s the thunderbird jellyfish! we’re frakked/going to be ok!!!) manufacturing synthbio antigens that rain like snowflakes.

9 thoughts on “Random Head Processing Of The Day”

Yes, reading GF made me think of Thunderbirds. Since Gerry Anderson still wants to resurrect Thunderbirds, I keep bashing my brain to see how such a series could be updated. It’d have to be decentralized just like GF. Of course, thinking like that creates all sorts of problems (even with a puppet or CGI cast). The more I think about the Anderson series, the more I conclude they just threw the Adult Rulebook out the window. “But wait, that can’t be done.” “We’ll do it anyway. It’ll make a great story!” Ah, the innocent 1960s!

That’s all well and good until the anarchists/terrorists/communists/fundamentalists start launching masses of backpack-size drones that fly themselves into the jellyfish and inject mutators. Now they’re snowing death spores in a mist that smells hauntingly like jasmine, and there’s no escape.